You’re talking about William Bligh’s open-boat voyage after the Bounty mutiny in 1789 — and it’s one of the most extraordinary feats of seamanship ever recorded.
After Fletcher Christian and the mutineers cast him and 18 loyal crew adrift near Tonga, Bligh had:
- A 23-foot open launch
- No charts for most of the route
- Very limited provisions: a few pounds of ship’s biscuit, some salted pork, a little rum and wine — barely enough for a few days if eaten normally.
- No weapons except a few cutlasses
- A small sextant and a pocket watch — no chronometer, so all longitudes had to be estimated by dead reckoning.
Survival without “food”
Bligh rationed brutally from the start.
- Each man got about 1 ounce of bread and ¼ pint of water per day — just enough to keep them alive but in a constant state of hunger.
- They supplemented with what they could scavenge: occasional rainwater, seabirds, and a few coconuts when they dared approach islands (many were hostile).
- He deliberately avoided most inhabited islands because they had already been attacked once, and he knew stopping could mean death.
The extreme calorie restriction meant everyone’s body went into survival mode — losing huge amounts of weight but remaining just functional enough to row and bail.
Navigation to the East Indies
Bligh was a master navigator, trained under Captain Cook. He:
- Used a sextant and his watch to take daily observations of the Sun for latitude.
- Estimated longitude using dead reckoning — mentally tracking speed, course, and time since last position fix.
- Followed the outer arc of the South Pacific — keeping well away from hostile islands.
- Navigated over 3,600 nautical miles from near Tonga to Timor in the Dutch East Indies — all in 47 days — without losing a single man to starvation.
Why he survived
- Ruthless rationing — he would rather see the men suffer than eat their way into an early grave.
- Discipline and order — the boat was run as if still under Royal Navy command.
- Top-tier navigation skills — he knew where fresh water and safe passages might be found.
- Avoidance of unnecessary risks — he refused tempting landfalls that might cost lives.
If you strip the romance from it, Bligh’s survival was basically the combination of military discipline, skilled navigation, and starvation-level rationing — with a pinch of luck that they didn’t get wrecked in a storm.
If you like, I can map out his exact route with the key survival events — it’s a fascinating day-by-day story.
